Printing from SAP is an important function of the business application. It is a specialized area of focus due to the critical dependency of most business processes such as invoicing, bills of materials, packing slips, paychecks, etc. We have experience with customers whose manufacturing production line literally stops when the print jobs from SAP fail. Even with today's electronic output format such as Adobe PDF, the delivery of these documents to the recipient stops when the Adobe Document Services (ADS) fails.
| Output Management |
SAP |
IT-Conductor |
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It is important to monitor the performance of the SAP spool system regularly in order to forestall avoidable errors. Using SAP CCMS, the status of the spool system can be easily discovered and open alerts can be analyzed.
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The spool consistency check is used to determine inconsistency in the tables containing spool requests, output requests, and output data.
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To maintain a healthy spool database, regular spool consistency checks must be performed as well as the deletion of old spool requests, to avoid capacity issues. Considering the performance effect of running a spool consistency check, it is recommended to schedule it at an off-peak period.
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It is recommended to run the following reports regularly in order to avoid common errors such as spool overflow:
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A spool consistency check can be carried out using the report RSPO1043. This checks tables: TSP01, TSP02, TST01, and TST03
as well as other TSP* tables. Report RSPO1042 finds and deletes ADS files for which there is no longer a spool request.
- It is recommended to run the following reports regularly in order to avoid common errors such as spool overflow:
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It is recommended to run the following reports regularly to avoid common errors such as spool overflow:
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IT-Conductor provides an effective way of monitoring the spool system such that you can easily detect when there is a potential problem and take necessary preventive measures
Simultaneously monitor:
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Dispatcher queue utilization of Spool process
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Spool-related CCMS alerts
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Spool queue (number range) utilization
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Spool processing wait times
- Remote print destinations can be checked via RFC ping
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For external print server (lpd), IT-Conductor can:
- Monitor print queue status via Linux app monitoring and notify if any printer device has abnormal status.
- Monitor the lp daemon (lpd) is running.
Any of the monitors above can have an exception (known in IT-Conductor as Threshold Overrides or for an Alert matching a filter called Object Template) which triggers an Alert and optional Notification.
Furthermore, a Recovery Action, such as an SAP spool administration housekeeping job can be scheduled or triggered when the exception is caught.
Housekeeping jobs can be scheduled and monitored from the IT-Conductor SAP Job scheduling feature.
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Figure 1: IT-Conductor SAP Monitoring Spool (Output Management System)
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